Reviews
Marina Vaizey
Once a year, the National Portrait Gallery gives us a slice of immediate social history presented in an array of contemporary painted portraits of the young, the old, and the inbetween. In its 40th iteration the international competition 44 paintings have been chosen from well over 2000 entries submitted by artists from 84 countries, ranging from Australia to Turkey, with the vast majority being from the UK.The subjects are from the artists’ worlds: self portraits, family, friends, models. Over the years the ethnicities have widened visibly, in heartening ways. Charlie Schaffer’s Imara in her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Healthy, efficient and carbon-neutral, cycling ought to be a transport panacea. But in the dash for lycra, perhaps not enough attention has been paid to letting bikes and motor vehicles co-exist peacefully. This deliberately provocative Channel 5 documentary, which has sparked an angry backlash from within the cycling community, found plenty of ammunition from both sides.It took the easy option by rounding up some grouchy London black-cab drivers to have a sustained whinge about the two-wheeled plague which they see as yet another threat to their livelihood (nobody mentioned Uber). They Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Montreal Jazz Festival is vast. It attracts an audience of between 1.5 and 2 million people over its 12 nights. It has been estimated to bring the city more revenue than the Canadian Grand Prix.And yet size, as we were often reminded in this year's 40th edition of the festival, is not everything. The festival has been an increasingly powerful vindication of its co-founders’ original vision which dates from the heady idealistic days when Montreal was thinking really big: in 1980, the year of the first festival, there had been the Expo and the Olympics; it was also the year of the Read more ...
David Nice
Seven European cities, seven works: from an eight-year-old's First Symphony composed in what is now Ebury Street to the towering concert aria for Josepha Dushchek of Prague's Villa Bertramka, Ian Page's latest Mozart cornucopia took us on a rich and at times startling journey, a testament - as Page wrote eloquently yesterday in his article for The Arts Desk - to the abiding need for freedom of movement in a human being's development, regardless of artistic talent or age.If there was a flaw, it came in the inevitable grouping of pretty but hardly ground-breaking numbers in the first half - and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s a topical idea, at least. Isaac Mensah, a child actor from a working-class family in London, has been cast in a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, and when he returns home his family and friends are agog to find out what his amazing movie experience was like. But the sky falls in when Isaac (Max Fincham) plays his parents a video he shot on his phone, containing evidence that he was abused by the film’s all-powerful producer, Jotham Starr, the boss of Yonder Starr Productions.Somehow though, the parts add up to less than a whole, with neither characters nor action feeling especially plausible Read more ...
Owen Richards
Among the summer gigs being held in Caerphilly this summer, it seemed a tall order for electronic/math rock instrumentalists Public Service Broadcasting to pack out a castle. They may be more current, but the others (The Stranglers, Groove Armada, The Zutons et al) at least had notable commercial periods. PSB’s biggest singles have never troubled the UK Top 75. And though a £40 ticket price on the door seemed optimistic, the castle’s savvy booking became clear as we passed through those ancient gates. A large courtyard, very much packed.After three albums and several EPs, PSB have crafted Read more ...
Owen Richards
It sometimes feels like an age between Stranger Things seasons. Blame Netflix. The binge-watching trend that it helped solidify means that most people consume all eight hours of content in a single weekend. It comes and goes in a flash. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s a disposable snack, the TV equivalent of those famous Eggo pancakes. Stranger Things 3 is blockbuster television, full of the laughs, jumps and exaggerated nostalgia that made it such a hit in 2016.After a mixed-bag second season, creators The Duffer Brothers have returned to their winning formula. Gone are the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Few theatres have done as much to promote new young talent as the Royal Court; few theatres have done as much to stage plays about the pains and pleasures of the digital world; few venues have tackled the themes of race and gender in contemporary society more effectively. Now, once again, it's time for a young writer to make their debut in the upstairs studio space. Step forward Jasmine Lee-Jones, whose new play, Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner, has an arresting title, and has been advertised as an exploration of "cultural appropriation, queerness, friendship between womxn and the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s staging, now in its fourth London return, has enough charm and substance to justify an outing with lesser names. And the revival cast is certainly competent, with no obvious weak links, and a sense of ensemble that keeps the hackneyed plot ticking over and the light comedy just on the right side of cliché.The production was designed for big stages – it Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Not too long ago it would have been unthinkable for a BBC One Sunday-night period drama series to tell of one woman’s love for another. Whatever anyone thought of it – and not everyone bade it the hearty welcome it merited – Gentleman Jack has shifted the dial.Was it a coincidence that it completed its run the day after a reported one and a half million people in London turned out to celebrate the freedom to love whoever you choose? (And the day the mauve-maned Megan Rapinoe completed her apotheosis as a gay icon in the final of the Women's World Cup?) Anne Lister, so cussed and crotchety in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two hundred years ago next month, an assembly of around 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to protest about their lack of political representation. Speakers addressed the crowd, bands played and banners were carried.The local magistrates didn’t like it and gave orders for the crowd to be dispersed by the mounted yeomanry, backed up by the hussars, who drew their sabres and charged. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. That was the "Peterloo Massacre", named after the Battle of Waterloo, only four years before. The centre of its site became that of the Free Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
“When I was a small boy growing up in the south of England,” says Frank Turner - pausing just long enough for the anticipated good-natured jeering from the Scottish crowd - “I dreamed of playing the legendary King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut.”It may sound disingenuous - it’s certainly not the first time that Turner, who barely six months ago sold almost 10 times as many tickets to sell out Glasgow’s O2 Academy, has played the city’s most storied venue - but the hollers in response are of a crowd who are in on the joke. This hastily-arranged stop filling in for a cancelled festival date is a rare chance Read more ...